The storage and data processing capabilities of personal computers have increased to the point that is now possible to provide video processing on such computers. Computer systems that can capture video from cameras, recorders, or television tuners are currently available. Video signals usually have very low quality. The video appears to be of better quality, because the errors from frame to frame are "averaged" by the viewer's eyes.
There is a growing interest in creating high quality still images from video sequences. Since each video frame has relatively poor resolution, the information in a number of frames is combined to generate a still image having a resolution that is much better than the individual frames. The prior art methods for combining the frames operate on uncompressed data in the "pixel" domain.
While storage costs have decreased considerably, the amount of data inherent in a video sequence is still too large to allow more than short video clips to be stored without some form of compression. Accordingly, many video capture systems output compressed video data. The compression algorithms reduce the high frequency information, which is needed to create high-quality still images, and hence, further complicate the still image construction problem. In addition, the compressed video contains quantization information that is not easily utilized in the pixel domain.
Broadly, it is the object of the present invention to provide an improved still image reconstruction system.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a still image reconstruction system that operates on compressed video data.
It is a still further object of the present invention to provide a still image reconstruction system that takes into account the quantization information in the compressed video sequence.
These and other objects of the present invention will become apparent to those skilled in the art from the following detailed description of the invention and the accompanying drawings.